Making it Up with Katrina Denza, author of Burner and Other Stories

"Problem solving is done in the woods a lot of times for me... or doing dishes, you'll have an aha moment, right? It's the magic—you can't beat it into fruition... magically, it just shows itself. It's quite fun." — Katrina Denza 

Katrina Denza’s stories have appeared in Nelle, Slippery Elm, and Jabberwock Review, among other places. Her work has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her debut story collection, BURNER AND OTHER STORIES, was published in November 2025. From 2015 to 2021 she served as chair of the Writers-in-Residence Program for the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities in North Carolina.

Among other things, Katrina and Carter discuss New England, learning to fall in love with the process, and how inspiration can strike at random moments. At the end of their conversation, they make up a gripping story using a line from The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Friends, hello. This is Carter, and welcome to this episode of Making It Up, the podcast where I sit down with other writers and we talk for a little while and we make up a story on the spot at the end of it. So, same format every time. I have a lot of fun. Um, I hope you enjoy listening to this as well. Uh, please, if you're interested in this podcast, please subscribe to it wherever you get your podcast. Tell your friends about it. Um, and importantly, leave reviews. As with everything, reviews do absolutely matter. Um, before I get to today's guests, um, what am I going to talk about? What am I going to plug? You know, I've got this book coming out in November that I'm super excited about. And it is called When They Find Me. And it is actually getting some great early buzz and getting read early review copies, getting read, reviews going up. Um, and I just want to emphasize how important pre-orders are to an author. Uh, why are pre-orders important? Pre-orders are important because all of those orders that take place in the months before publication all get counted towards that first week's sales figure. Um, and that's important because that week's sales figures goes towards hopefully making fun bestseller lists. Um, because you want to have a strong showing because best-seller lists, you look at weekly sales. Um, and your first couple weeks, those are when most of your sales occur. So I urge you, I implore you, I whatever. I'm on my knees begging very politely. If you're interested in my books uh and you're interested in reading When They Find Me, which comes out in November, please go to my website and you can read about the book. And there's a little button on there to pre-order, and it can take you to any one of your favorite retailers to get that done. So thank you in advance for that. I'm sure I'll be hawking my wears about this more as the months go on. All right, today's guest, I had the pleasure of uh talking to um the wonderful Katrina Danzo. So Katrina is a writer of short fiction, and her most recent her debut collection uh came out in November of 2025. It's called Burner and Other Stories. Um, and I I had a fantastic talk with her. This is, you know, you talk to somebody like Katrina, and I'm like, all right, this is a real writer. Not that I talk to unreal writers, but um she she's a writer. You know, you know, it's in her blood. And she even said, this was something that was always I always wanted to do when I was young. Um, you know, of course, we take time away to raise families and all those things, but uh about 20 years ago, she really started getting back into it. Um and has had always gravitated towards short fiction. And she has dabbled in novels and she's working on a novel right now, but really short fiction is where her heart's at and where how her writerly brain works, which is short fiction is a huge struggle for me. I'm very jealous of people who can do that. Um but so it was just really interesting to hear the parallels between writing novels and writing short fiction in our conversation and and kind of the struggles you have all the time with the same things and the things that are important to both styles of writing, things like community, which we talked about a lot, the ability to take rejection and view it as redirection, um, and finding those early readers who can really give you the advice you need and being vulnerable and curious enough to listen to people and not just be stubborn about your writing and being willing to be flexible and to grow and to learn as a writer. Um, so she was terrific. I really enjoyed our conversation together. And then at the end, we made up a kind of weird little infidelity story, starting with a line from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. So you're gonna love this one, folks. There's a lot of good writing advice in this episode. This is my conversation with Katrina Denza. But your um your debut just came out last, what, last November, right? Or last November. So so you yeah, so Julia reached out and I was reading about you. So you came out with a debut collection of stories, is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

You've been writing for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

About 20 years.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

And it is so we're similar in terms of yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

I'm sorry. Go ahead. Um no, I wrote as a kid, so I've always loved writing, and I just took a very long break from writing to raise my kids and um paint.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

You know, I just had that artistic brain.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yeah. Where did you grow up? Vermont. Oh, that's uh my last book was set there, and that's a place that my partner and I have always kind of I'm in Colorado that we've kind of had an eye on, and we're doing a New England road trip this summer, and we're gonna spend, we haven't figured out where yet, but we're gonna spend at least a week out in Vermont somewhere. Where where in Vermont were you raised?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Um, well, I was born in Burlington, and then my family moved to central Vermont, uh Rutland town area. So then, yeah, yeah. Um, you're gonna love Vermont, particularly in the summer.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

I was about to say, particularly in the summer. So we're doing Maine and her son is going to be going to the University of Maine, so we're kind of dropping him off, and then just I write a lot about New England, and I don't have that much familiarity with New England. I just set a lot of my books there for that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

I mean, I can see why it sort of has this old gothic feel to it. Totally.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah, the first time I did it, I knew it was going to be taking place in the two weeks leading up to Halloween, and I just I wanted a location. And I like loc I like places I don't know. I like to write about things I don't know about. It's just interesting. And I just kind of thought New England's kind of creepy. And you know, and then you know, went out there, visited, skulked around a bit, and it's yeah, there's a lot of good vibes. There's a lot of towns where you know I try to avoid the tiny, tiny, tiny towns because then everybody knows everything. Oh, but you know, you've got a lot of small towns and then you've got Boston, you know. Right, right. There's a lot of in-between. So I chose Manchester, New Hampshire because that was kind of big enough where you didn't necessarily know everybody.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Yeah, I actually um I uh sort of rode horses and trained in Concord, New Hampshire, which isn't that Yeah, yeah, no.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

We've been looking at that too for Airbnb. Yeah, and my last book was Burlington. So wow. Yeah, so research the coffee shops there and all that stuff. But so you were a creative kid, and it's funny about writing because I'm always I always contend that if there's a writer in you, it'll it'll come out kicking and screaming at some point. And there's I think there has to be this confluence of your your desire for writing, and then also understanding what it's like to be a writer, knowing the realities of being a writer, and that you really takes a lot of years, and obviously raising kids and all the other stuff that we have to do to be like, all right, now I'm ready for this very unpredictable whatever this is going to be. Um, and it sounds like maybe that was the case for you.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've always read. So I think that if you're a reader, you're a writer. I say that to a lot of people. Um, and I believe it if you read as much as you know, as I do anyway, or and a lot of my friends read as much as I do. And I just think it's a it's like a natural part of the conversation, reading and writing. But um in that 20 years that I've been writing, it was practice and community, finding my community, right? Finding, you know, for instance, I was part of Zootope Virtual Studio, yeah, and it was like a free MFA. It was that's great.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

But it's a commitment, like you, I'm sure there's a lot of people who dabble, but you really have to apply yourself and to be dedicated to it.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

There's another word for that, stubborn, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

But yeah, I mean, a lot of you know, I've interviewed 250 plus people on this, and what it there's a there's a few hallmarks of writers, and one of them absolutely is tenacity. Like there's people who read a book, like I can do better than this. But then, you know, to your point, it's kind of interesting. You say if you're a reader, you're a writer. And I think that's generally true. But how many people have we met? You'd say you're a writer, like, oh, I've always I've got this idea, I've always wanted to do that. There is there is this bridge to commitment that most people, you know, walk a few feet on and then they turn around, or they commit and then they get a rejection and then they turn, you know, it's it's really much harder, I think, than most people realize.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

That's very true. And I would say, you know, not to discount the very uh the the truth of needing to learn craft.

unknown 10:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

You know, so you can want to be a writer all you want, or you can have a story in your head all you want, but if you want to reach more readers than just, you know, a couple of people here and there, it's a commitment to learning the craft. In whatever way that means, I don't necessarily believe you need an MFA. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Oh no, yeah. It depends on what you're writing to.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Exactly. Um, and I think having an MFA is great. I know a lot of my friends they say their benefit of having an MFA was to have the time allotted to reading and writing. Um but you know, I I think it's a it's necessary to to learn to fail over and over and accept failure as a part of your process.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I preach that all the time, and and to really kind of reimagining failure as what do I learn from this? This is this this is just redirection, you know, and and that's a hard thing to learn because if you see a lot of it's out of our control, right? A lot of it is just it's got to hit the right person at the right time and they're gonna say yes if you want to be traditionally published. But a lot of it's just like, okay, this clearly this book isn't ready yet, or this story isn't ready yet. Let's move on to the next one. Because I got lots of ideas, but some people just and because I coach writing too, and I see it, it's like they won't you can tell the manuscripts that are decent, but probably not marketable. But I saw that in myself. I'm like, that just means that was my first two years of college writing that book. Now I I gotta continue my education. I'm not ready yet, but I needed this to get to the next step. It's so true, Carter.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

I mean, I have published I had published around 30 short stories before I wrote these stories in Burner. And I could have collected them. And in fact, I might have collected some and um, you know, searched for an agent with with that collection. But I I wasn't a hundred percent behind publishing those stories as a collection. They felt a bit disparate and I felt they didn't speak to the times in the way that the stories embarrassed. So yeah, I think those were my, and not to discount them, but they were sort of my uh training.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Yeah, totally. It's funny when I talk to people, if I'm speaking somewhere, and I tell them about I got an agent with my first book, same agent I'm with today, 20 plus years later, but my first three books didn't sell. And and to to non-writers, that's like, how can you just let are you going to go back and try to publish those now? And it's like, you don't understand. Like I'm okay. I let it all go. Like, I needed those, those, those books to learn how to write. That was my education because I don't have an MFA and I went to business school essentially. So I had to learn how to do this, and it just takes hundreds of thousands of words and failures, and being vulnerable enough to learn and be curious to keep going. Uh, that's how that's how I was able to do it. But you got to let the past go.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Absolutely. And I think my time as a painter really taught me failure. I mean, I am a failed artist, but I'm okay with that. Yeah, I you know, I still play around with it. Um, but it really did teach me to be able to separate myself from the product, the end product, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And be more interested in the process, which yeah, I think the process of writing can be a beautiful meditative thing.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

I I use the word meditation all the time because it's one of the few times of the day, if not the only time of the day, that you are forced to be so fully in the present. And it's not just about concentration, it's just about being in the present and being like in the story. And it and, you know, whether it's frustrating or whether it's flowing, it's it's a magical part of the day.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah. I love that. Do you set yourself a word count a day?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Or how do you Yeah, I do. So when I started writing, I had a corporate job, so and we were pregnant with our first kid and you know, that whole thing. So I learned how to write an hour a day, uh, seven days a week. And now that I write full time, that's still what I do. So I go, I go to a coffee shop every morning, seven days a week for an hour. And if I'm writing actively, five to seven hundred words, maybe. If I'm editing, you know, it might be 20 pages, whatever it is, but it's you just chip away and it gets it. That's all it takes. You get up.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

It does my low uh goal for writing a day is 250 words.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah, that's all it takes. It really it's about building that muscle and maintaining the muscle um and the consistency. You know, what what I think one of the biggest mistakes I'm seeing the spidering writers do, you have talented, creative people is you know, they're waiting for the muse, they're waiting for the right moment. And they might have a 4,000-word through the night session, which is great, but then they don't touch it for another month. Right. And and that's you know, and then we start talking about the difference between you know being a writer and being a career writer because there's a lot of other considerations. And one of the things about being a career writer is consistency. Um and it's it's really hard to do, and but it is about that muscle.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Sure, sure. Do you ever um take residencies? Have you ever done that?

SPEAKER_01 16:11

I haven't. I haven't yet, but I saw that you you did for quite some time, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:15

I I yes, I've been fortunate to go to a few. One, I used to actually run a writing residency. I was chair of the program. Um, but for me, you know, I still don't write 4,000 words a day.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

But I think they would be I my words would be terrible after the first thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

But you know, I I am more focused and more productive in a residency than I am at home, even.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Um it's such an intentional thing, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

But I don't think, you know, I've always I can't write from a vacuum. I have to have some connection to life and community. So I wouldn't want to sequester myself away for you know a long period of time. That would it would get very dull.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yeah. I mean, isn't that funny, the the irony of that? Because that is kind of the image we all conjure as kind of a dream. And I've taken I've taken trips alone just to go right, and it does get boring. It's you know, you're like, all right, I I you know, because my my brain goes to mush after a certain word count, and then I'm like, now what do I do the rest of the day? I can't, you know, I'm not phoreau here. I'm not gonna just immerse myself into nature. That's not how my brain works. I want to watch TV or something. So when you when you kind of started this recommitment 20 years ago to writing, how much of it because this is what I'm always curious, kind of talking about the career path, how much of it was like, I'll just write whatever comes to me versus being you know, really looking at like what's my best chance of getting something published, or what was the goal when you started?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Yeah, so if you had asked me 20 years ago, would I rather win a Pulitzer or be a best-selling author, I would have told you win a Pulitzer. Yeah, you know, now I'll take anything. No, but no, back then I wanted to, my goal was to publish a story.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yeah. Um which is terribly hard to do. Short story, long form, whatever. It's really really there's a lot of especially short fiction. I mean, uh, you know, there's a lot of people who are submitting to these to these magazines, and it's just really and I would argue even harder today than it was 20 years ago when it was. Oh, I think absolutely for all forms of getting published.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

But um, you know, so my goals were small, Carter, but you know, I knew down the road I wanted to have a book of short fiction. I fell in love with short fiction after I moved to North Carolina from Vermont. And I sort of discovered, you know, writers like um uh you know Richard Bausch and uh you know Mary Gatesgill, their short stories. And I was like, wow, look at what you can do in, you know, this much space. Um and so that was my focus for many years, writing short stories and getting them published. But then I started to think about you know, when I did get my first agent through the collection that I shopped, she wanted a novel. This was back in 2006, and you know, this is a story that many writers hear of short stories. They, you know, it's hard to sell short stories. And so I I started to write a novel, but it was coming out as a novel in stories in the agent. Like, no, can you do a linear novel? Well, stubborn me put that aside and wrote an entirely different linear novel. Oh we'll never see the light of day. I mean, it you know, not to again, not to disparage it, but it's not something that's marketable, but I did it to prove I could do it.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

And what was that how what was that process like? Because you had done these short stories and it that must have felt very different.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

It was kind of weird. I did it quickly. Oh, like yeah, and I think that's the tenacity in me. Like, oh yeah, well, you know, maybe that project isn't coming out as a novel, but I I've got another idea and I can do it. Um and yeah, it it taught me that I have the capacity to do it, but I think it's really hard to write a novel if you've been writing short stories for a while.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

I I think all forms of writing are hard. I mean, I've probably so my 11th book is coming out, but I've written maybe a dozen short stories in my life, like not that many. Um and I find it so incredibly difficult because I'm immediately like, oh, there's so much more to this, but how do I how do I create an arc in 3,000 words? You know, it's you know, and I'm just not good at it. And you know, that's just not and it I think there's something about we have to we have to balance kind of our dreams and what we want to see on the bookshelf with what how our brains work, what we're good at. And boy, I'll tell you like I just that's not my strength, short fiction, because I I don't know how people can just like you said, how you do so much with so few so few words, and it's it's it's really a magical thing.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Well, it's even I used to play with uh flash fiction and micro. Fiction, I can't do it now. It is talk about magic, I think.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Meaning, meaning like 500 and less kind of a thing.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And people who do it and do it well, like Kim Chinqwi and Kathy Fish, they are brilliant at it. And it seems it's like prose poetry.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Not quite, you know, it's a little different. Um, but I'm trying my hand at a novel now, and it's a blast. It's daunting, Carter. It's daunting. I don't know how you've done 11 of it.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Doesn't get any easy. I mean, uh the physical act, the muscle, muscular act of writing gets easier because you've trained that part of your brain. You can once I kind of know what I'm writing about, at least for a scene, like it's not super hard. But if yeah, I'm immediately overwhelmed by because I don't outline, so I'm like, I just see the light in front of me, and I'm like, I have no idea if this is a cohesive anything. Like, I'm literally shipping off my next manuscript to my agent because she likes to see it in paper today. Wow. I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, I don't know. It might be good, it might be terrible, and you just lose it's so big you lose all context for it because you spend so much time with it.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

I understand, or I'm at least I can, I'm getting to that point where I can understand. I don't outline either.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

I might try to envision the next three chapters.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

But there are so many decisions to be made.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

So yeah, and it's a lot of about trusting your instinct, but then that's a really hard thing to do. I mean, I I think most writers, including myself, in in the act of writing are full of self-doubt all the time. So when you say trust your instinct, you're like, Well, my instincts wrong. Um, but that's all that's all I could do, you know, because like you said, what else are you gonna do? You're gonna you could you have 20 paths you can go down. You can't go down them all. You can go down one.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

The thing is with short stories, you can't, you can go down a few paths, right? I have rewritten a short story, you know, it might have started out in first person, and then I rewrote the whole thing into third person, you know, changed the tense sometimes, taking out characters, you know, you can totally rip up and rearrange the the plot in a short story. Um, and that's for me part of the fun. It's completely inefficient to do that with a novel.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Like it is, but I feel like all those short stories also train you to find your voice in a way. Um, because it was my fifth book where I realized what I'm best at is first person present tense. But it took four you know, or including the unpublished ones, seven books to figure that out. And boy, it would have been nicer to have written a lot of short stories where I played around with different things and and realized that ahead of time because that ended up being what I consider to be my voice. And it's you know, it's it's a lot of words to to get there. And and I've said I've I've guessed wrong on novels before where I've written that whole novel third past and gone back and changed it, and that sucks. That's a that's months, months of work. Um, how far into this book are you?

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Um a few notes, and I would say four thousand words, so not very far. But I have the first sort of six chapters sort of envisioned.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Got it. Um now is this something that you that tenacity came back, you're like, I want to do this again, or is this something that your agent's like you should give this another shot? Yeah, I don't have an agent. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

So no, that agent gave up on me years ago. Actually, she left she left the agency. But um no, I this is just something I want to do. I actually have two novel ideas, and so I'm I'm going with one that feels hotter to me right now, right? And then I actually have another story collection drafted but not revised. So it's in you know, in a stage where I wouldn't show it to anybody, really.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Right, right. And I and I love what you said earlier when you said you started out, you know, you just had very small goals, but I think that's so important is you had small goals, but you had goals, right? You have something to work towards. And you know, sometimes I see people with like these it's it's okay to have an unrealistic goal. I think that's fine, as long as you can temper expectations. But what I'm seeing are people who I think they like the idea of being a writer more than they like writing. And I think goal setting only works if you have that, which you clearly do, underlying passion for just the art of storytelling and the ability to say, like, yeah, maybe this gets published, maybe it doesn't, but the next one, but the next one, but the next one. And all the while you're like storytelling. And I think a lot, I think that's that's the the the nuance of the magic in it all. Um, is that I think the people who see any kind of commercial success, however you want to define that, you know, they would be writing no matter what, because they just keep doing it and they're learning in the process.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Because I think you really have to love the process. Like you, you know, like I have tried and and been much more successful in the last five years, separating myself from the product and falling in love with the process. And that's when things clicked for me. That's when I stopped worrying about, you know, if a story was going to get published, and instead drafted these stories and worked on them with an idea of a book in mind. Like so the whole book was the process, instead of I want validation by getting something published. And not to say I didn't send out the stories for publication, but I didn't send them out as quickly as I had other stories in my past. You know, these I took my time with, and if they didn't get published, it wasn't a sort of um comment on whether or not they were valuable. Yeah. They were valuable to me. And that is the most important thing that I learned about my own process. And it took me 20 years, or you know, maybe not 15 years, it took me.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

But but those 15 years, you had to go through that, right? I they like it doesn't have it's not that's none of it's wasted time. And I I totally agree. And I think this circles back to your comment about meditation because the way that I and I think maybe a lot of panters, the us non-outliners approach things, is it's all problem solving to me. It's like every day that I drive to this coffee shop and I sit down, it's not like I'm going to work where I'm just like, oh God, another day. I'm just like, what happens? And I don't know what happens, and I gotta solve the problem. And it might be tough and it might be frustrating, but it's such a mental exercise. It's like doing, you know, high-level seduco every day. And it's exciting, and sometimes I hate it, but it's like it's never something I don't want to do.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Right, right. So I don't go to a coffee shop, but I do walk in the woods a lot, and you know, problem solving is done in the woods a lot of times for me. And I have my phone with me, and I'll just take notes on my phone.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Do you think you're taking voice notes and stuff like that? Yeah, no, I'm not I'm not actually like like writing notes on your phone.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Yeah, stopping. But um, yeah, that's like part of the whole thing. Or as you know, you know, doing dishes, you'll have an aha moment, right? You know, so it's just part of in it's integrated into your day, this always trying to solve the problems of your novel or your story or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Totally. And I don't, it's funny because I tell people, I think it's mostly true, I don't think about my book so much when I'm not in the act of writing it. But there's something about letting go every day that opens your mind, right? Like you're not trying to grasp onto something so hard that you can't hold on to it. And it'll be like I might be watching a show, and then something that they do like occurs to me, oh my God, this solves X problem. And I'll look at it and I'll think, am I just like grasping for solutions? Or was I supposed to be sitting here in this moment watching this because this has some kind of tangential advice to what I'm working on? And I think it's the latter. And if you just let yourself go, that stuff comes to you if you don't try to force it.

SPEAKER_00 31:26

It's it's the magic. You can't beat it into fruition for like I can. I can like force myself to solve the problem. But yeah, magically it just shows itself. It's right quite fun.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Yeah, it's the subconscious, right? Because it's like, you know, when you when you're with somebody and you suddenly forget their name, and the harder you try to think of it, you can't and then later on you're doing the dishes and the name just comes to you. That's how it is with writing for me. It's like if you just if you don't try to chase it so hard, it'll come. And I think that weighs in against a lot, a lot of natural impatience we writers tend to have. We want it to be done, we want, we want it to be tidy, uh, you know, we want to know that we chose the right path. And if you're not willing to just let go and you know, accept that you don't know what's going to happen. If you don't have that, then it's a really, it's a really hard career path. Are you so you revise a lot or what I tend to do, I I have learned over time as a pantser to again to trust my instincts. So I tend to like I'll write a first draft and maybe look back once, like about halfway through. And that's mostly just to literally remember what I wrote because I'm not because I'm just making it up. Right, right. And then and then it's like I get the draft done, and then it's two or three full revisions. But I guess when I revise, it's not like it's rare that I'm chopping 20,000 words and adding 30,000 words. It's you know, it's making sure there do I see a theme in here? Isn't there a theme in here? Is there what I consider to be an arc in here? And how do I tease this out more? Um, and then it, you know, but then like all of us, I think we have to recognize when we've done the best that we're willing to do, and and recognize that we're part of a team. So I give it to my agent. She's an editorial agent, she gives me great feedback. Then it goes to my publisher. I mean, I might do months of edits for my publisher. Um, and I'm thankful because I'm like, yes, you're seeing stuff that I can't see. Um so it's having those, like you mentioned early on, community. It's having those trusted partners. And the hard part is finding those people and finding the ones that you can really trust. Um, but once you do, you can't let them go.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Right. And also, I think our experience, because you've been writing a long time too, you can kind of take critique that makes sense to you and works for you and just sort of discard the rest. That's a nice um that's a skill set though. It is a skill set that I learned through doing like a couple of workshops. I went to Suwani and um breadloaf a couple of times. And it you you can you can tune out because if you don't, you would you know be trying to please a Frankenstein story, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't work, but so then you kind of fine-tune what makes sense to you and your story, and I think that skill carries you through many projects, you know what I mean. I I do have a first reader and a couple of other readers that are very important to me, and I do trust them. Um yeah, I don't think I ever send anything out without it having been read by someone else.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

And it's and it's a feeling more than anything, right? Like if you're in a critique group, because it's at first it's hard to separate out somebody criticizing it versus somebody giving you something that you believe is a good addition to your manuscript or change to it. And that's I think where the skill comes in. Um, but for me, ultimately, it was like when somebody would say something that I just almost felt in my bones, like like when you have that feeling of like, oh my god, I should have thought of that. That's when I know it's good feedback, or at least like-minded feedback, as opposed to a structural change. A lot of people want to tell you how they would have done it. Well, yes, that doesn't do you any good.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

No, and so often I'll be specific and I'll say, please tell me if you see a problem, but please don't tell me how to solve the problem.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

Because I I have to do it.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

Yeah. I my book coming out in November when the very the first draft I gave to my um publisher, my editor and I had a call, and she's like, I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels a little masculine, which was really interesting considering it was primary point of view from a female. Oh, okay. And you know, but there was this kind of organized crime adjacent element to it, and then and then I just totally saw it. I might I get what you're saying a hundred percent. I don't think it's a pro, you know. I you're talking about a different type of book, but I think I agree with you. So I actually replaced all the characters in the book except for one, um, that that female. Um, but she just that was all she had to say was like it just feels this. And I had to think about it. And I'm like, but that's the feedback I need. And uh, and then we could start kind of brainstorming, but I love that, not like, you know, this is you know, you have to change this with this. Or another one is like, I love this one small character, I'd love to see more of them. And you're like, yeah, I think you're right. What could I do with that? Like, how could how can that character flesh out my primary character by having them on screen more? Um, I love all that stuff because again, that's the it's the the the puzzle solving.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I've gotten that last one a couple of times.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Um so your next thing, so you so your book is out, and that's exciting and scary and done, and you know, all it's been wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

I I love the press and um yeah, I had a great launch. It was so much fun.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Yeah, it's very, it's very, it doesn't feel real sometimes, you know. It's just like wow, that's yeah, I remember my first goal was when I got an agent. I'm like, I just only I used to want to have one book published that I can show my kids. That was like kind of it. There's something about the copies, the the the physicality of it all, which is just so sublime in a way, the smell of opening up a box of books.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

Yeah. Well, I used to joke with my friends and my family, I just want to publish a book before I die. Right. And so now my joke is well, I guess I could die now.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

But it was it was it important to you? I don't want to put words in your mouth because I'm speaking from my own experience. Was it important to you that somebody published those stories as opposed to you self-published them?

SPEAKER_00 38:39

Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Yeah. Why is that do you think?

SPEAKER_00 38:43

Um because I had worked for 20 years at my craft and I felt I did that self-publishing wasn't necessary. And I feel so strongly about it for me. I think it's good for some people.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Um 100%, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

But for me, it was important that I pass through the gatekeeper.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Yeah, I I 100% agree. And my roots came from just the deep insecurity of you know, uh, that whole imposter syndrome, which I still have to some degree, that doesn't really go away. I mean, it's it's a real thing, and especially when you have zero background in writing, and you're like, if I self-publish, I'll always wonder was this just truly a vanity project and I'm and I'm not good enough, even though there's plenty of stuff that doesn't get published, that's way better than the stuff that is published. So it's you know, it's not a true meritocracy by any means, but it's but it was like you, it was important for me to have that gatekeeper say, okay, you can pass through and then you know, kind of work on it from there.

SPEAKER_00 39:57

Yeah, and I am, you know, unless like I think it's it's smart for maybe older people who are near the end of their lives, perhaps to leave family history with their family that way. And I think it's a great vehicle for that, or um, you know, for someone who has uh written something very niche and would have no hope of ever getting published and and it has a very specific audience. I think self-publishing can be useful. But you know, look, times are changing. Yeah, and um, you know, it might be, I know more and more people indie published because they they're now called indie published um books, and there are more and more every day.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

There are, yeah. And you know, I I think the the tough part of that as well, there's more content in general, right? Uh being produced, whether it's being authentically produced or artificially produced, whatever is being produced, there's a lot of content out there. And that's been that's been the case, you know, since 2006, since you wrote that like it's every year there's more and more and more. And what I I think kind of the double-edged sword of that is it's forcing more people to self-publish simply because agents and editors are flooded, and it's harder and harder and harder to get traditionally published simply because there's so much noise. And so I kind of get it too, right? If like you're like, I want to see this out there, and you know, there are people who, especially in certain genres, sci-fi fantasy is a big one. They know there's a market there who's going to buy good quality stuff regardless of who it's being put out by. Um, so I I get it. And there's also people who self-publish and then they get picked up, uh, you know, but it's yeah, there are those great stories.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

I worry, but you know, I worry about this in indie publishing, but the same can be said for traditional publishing, that publishing is becoming um it it it's for that we will only have elite voices or people who can afford to self-publish or promote their own work. You know what I mean? So I don't I I'm and then AI is a whole other right, but I I have faith in readers in that they will discern what they uh they'll discern good from from bad, they they can they can figure it out, and uh although Carter, I recently took one of those little tests, I think it was New York Times. Can you tell the difference between AI writing and real writing? And I think I got it wrong like three times.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

Yeah, yeah. But I think it's funny, one of the things I've been teaching a lot, and I have a class coming up, and it is it's about how to be visible as a writer beyond kind of the the page, because I think that's part of it, because I think I think what you ultimately want to strive for as an author is to have a voice that people follow, whether it's considered great writing or not, you know, it will be indistinguishable, it will be distinguishable from AI because it'll feel like your voice. Um, but I think on top of that, I think you need to be visible by doing exactly what you're doing now on camera. People can hear you like, oh, I listened to Katrina, I heard her voice. She's really cool. I'm I want to go pick up her short stories now. I I mean, I think in the world of AI, that's becoming more and more important. How do people know you not and not just your stories? And and that's a scary thing for a lot of writers because a lot of writers want to be in the Woods and not talk to anyone. So it's it's a balance.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

And community. That's where community comes in, right? So being a good literary citizen and um yeah, like what you do to help writers. And I think that works among us. And then how do you take that into the public? You know, how do you yeah?

SPEAKER_01 44:26

Totally. No, I'm I'm at Thriller Fest all next week in New York, and I work with the debut authors, and that's just a get on panels, try to moderate a panel, it be in an in-conversation partner with somebody for their book launch and be a good one. And you'll start to your voice will get out there, and it does really start to snowball. I mean, it takes years, but people will start to know you as somebody who this is your world, and they don't just know you by a book cover. And that's you know, that takes commitment, but I but it's also fun. I mean, that community aspect of it, making friends for life, and that's a huge part of it.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

Thriller Fest, that sounds like a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 45:08

Yeah, it's the global uh annual thriller conference, so it's about 2,000 people, it's in New York City every year, and it's it's fun. Yeah, I do a lot of volunteering for different parts of it, and it's yeah, but I started going well before I was published, and it's not cheap, of course, but the people I can call now and you know cry on their shoulder or invite on a podcast, you know, it's it's tremendous, and you realize it's a relatively small world in terms of the writing community overall, and you get to know people, and that that becomes more important, I think, than a lot of people give the credit for.

SPEAKER_00 45:50

I agree, I agree. Some of my very best friends have been made uh through conferences and you know, lifelong friends who through Zootrope, some of whom I've never met in person to this day.

SPEAKER_01 46:03

Right, right, right. I know that's amazing. Well, Katrina, we're gonna wrap up before we do. We're gonna get to the storytelling part of our show. Um this will be very short. Uh, I picked three books, not only at random, but like literally sitting next to each other on my bookshelf. I had no hardly any organization to my books here. Um, we're gonna choose one book, we're gonna choose one sentence from a random page, and I'm gonna read that sentence, and then that'll be the first sentence in like a two-minute long short story. I'll read a sentence, you give me the next sentence, or whatever comes to your mind, I do a sentence, and then it'll get bad really quick, and then I'll call it. Um so I've got um I don't even remember this book. Out of the Ashes by Maisie Moscoe. Um, short stories, the short stories of Scott Fitzgerald, and the novel Improbable by Adam Fower. So choose one of those. Fitzgerald. How did I know?

SPEAKER_00 47:02

How did you know?

SPEAKER_01 47:03

How did I you know it's funny? I I revisited Gatsby for the first time since high school. Um, and I remember like I was never in any kind of reading high school, and I revisited probably five years ago, and whatever it is, 165 pages. I mean, it's short fiction, really. Yeah, it blew me away. Like I didn't and I I knew I was going to enjoy it, but I was like, this is a profound story, and it's so well told. Um, all right, give me a page number between one and 472. 83. Okay, so I'm gonna quickly look at page 83. This is the first page of the short story titled May Day. Um so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna quickly find a sentence that might work. Um this is fairly formal writing, but we can do what um all right. I'm just gonna this is a piece of dialogue, somebody screaming, you do whatever you want with this. May heaven help me, for I know not what I shall do.

SPEAKER_00 48:18

I feel like I want to kill him. He's driving me crazy.

SPEAKER_01 48:27

We had only sat for the first 20 minutes of the performance, and I was about to claw my way through the armoress of the old theater. I never liked these kind of shows, and she always dragged me to them. But the actor on the stage, there was something getting under my skin that made me want to just charge him.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

It was that tick he had, that that way of always like clearing his throat. I just I don't know how much longer I could take it.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

I looked over at Laura, my wife of 13 years, and she knew I was going to complain. But when I looked at her, I saw how she stared at him, how her eyes moved up and down his body as he pranced around on the stage. She was the one who told me we had to see him in this performance because they had been friends from since high school. And now I was getting to to think there was something I didn't know about her.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

It took me a minute, but yeah, I was starting to maybe connect the dots. There was something, there was a way that she was looking at him a little too closely. I wanted to just jab her with my elbow. Get her attention away from him somehow. But, you know, I'm not gonna do that to my wife. I love her.

SPEAKER_01 50:01

I turned my attention back to the performance, but I didn't see anything. All I could do is compute the math in my head. Math that told me that this production had only been in town two weeks and it would only be here one week more. But the math also computed the hours she had been missing during those two weeks, hours that she said she was late for work, hours that seemed lost in a way that I wasn't used to from her.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

I started to feel like I needed to get some air. It was all it was all making sense now.

SPEAKER_01 50:39

I think we call it there. Infidelity and the stage. I love it. That went in a weird direction, but I love it. Poor Fitzgerald. Oh my gosh. I know we kind of bastardized it, but that's okay. I think I think we did just fine. Katrina, lovely to meet you, and congratulations on the recent release of your collection. And I can't wait to hear when this novel comes out. Good luck. Thank you so much. Good luck to you. All right, take care. Bye. So that's it. That is my conversation with Katrina Denza. I told you it was a good little short story. I thought that I thought that was nice. I thought that was going into a nice, dark, insecure place, which is uh no is a good kind of a story to tell. Uh, just a reminder, Katrina's collection of short fiction is out. It is called Burner and Other Stories, and you can find it and everything you want to know about Katrina at her website, which is Katrina Denza.com. And you can pop on over to carterwilson.com and check out my new book, When They Find Me. That'll be coming out in November 2026. And if you want to know anything about the types of um classes that I teach or the coaching that I do or our upcoming Paris retreat in spring 2027, head on over to uh unboundwriter.com. Unboundwriter.com. All right, friends, that is it. We are wrapping up this episode of Making It Up. It was a good one, another one out just next week. In the meantime, take care of the